Saturday, February 7, 2009
Console graphics solutions
Xenos, the Xbox 360 GPU.
Flipper - The Nintendo GameCube contains a 3D accelerator developed by ArtX, Inc, a company acquired by ATI during the development of the GPU. Flipper is similar in capability to a Direct3D 7 accelerator chip. It consists of 4 rendering pipelines, with hardware T&L, and some limited pixel shader support. Innovatively the chip has 3 MiB of embedded 1T-SRAM for use as ultra-fast low-latency (6.2 ns) texture and framebuffer/Z-buffer storage allowing 10.4 GB/second bandwidth (extremely fast for the time). Flipper was designed by members of the Nintendo 64 Reality Coprocessor team who moved from SGI. The Flipper team went on to have a major hand in development of the Radeon 9700.
Xenos - Microsoft's Xbox 360 video game console contains a custom graphics chip produced by ATI, known as "R500", "C1", or more often as Xenos. Some of these features include the embedded DRAM (eDRAM). The Xenos also features the “True Unified Shader Architecture” which dynamically loads and balances pixel and vertex processing amongst a bank of identically capable processing units. This differs greatly from past-generations PC graphics chips that have separate banks of processors designed for their individual task (vertex/fragment). Another feature presented in Xenos is the hardware surface tessellation to divide a surface into smaller triangles, similar to TruForm in terms of functionality, which is an advanced feature as it is not presented even in the most up-to-date DirectX 10 specification. The recent generation Radeon R600 GPU core inherited most of the features presented in Xenos, except eDRAM.
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